NATIONAL COMMUNITY CHURCH
July 17, 2011
The God Anthology: Beauty
Heather Zempel
If you had the ability to pray one prayer that you knew with 100% certainty God’s answer would
be ‘yes’ to, what would it be? If you had the chance to offer up one request that you knew God
would grant you, what would it be?
If you’ve got your Bible with you today, turn over to Psalm 27 and we’ll start there. If you don’t
have your Bible with you, it’ll be on the screen.
Earlier this week, we were at our annual staff play and pray retreat and at that retreat, we pray
and we play. That’s about all we do but we do both of those things very, very hard and there
were a couple of moments where the staff together as a team prayed really, really hard for one
another. And one of the questions that I found myself asking different staff members over the
course of the week was if you could pray one prayer that you knew God would answer, what
would it be? Throughout Scripture we see examples of this. We find that for Jacob it was to be
blessed. For Solomon it was to have wisdom. For Hezekiah it was to have his life spared. For
blind Bartemaus it was for sight. For the thief on the cross, it was that Jesus would remember
him. Often, our prayers are focused on the maintenance of our comfort and convenience and
well-being. But if you had one shot at it, one shot that you knew God would answer, what would
you pray for?
In Psalm 27:4, we see David’s answer to that question. It says:
One thing I ask from the Lord, this only do I seek, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all
the days of my life, to gaze on the beauty of the Lord and to seek Him in his temple.
To gaze on the beauty of the Lord. A couple of observations about this. Number one – If I had
one prayer to pray and I knew God would answer it, I’m not sure that would have been it.
Especially when you consider the circumstances that David is in here, because of the context
clues and the rest of the passage, it appears that this was one of the Psalms that David wrote
when he was running for his life, when Saul was hunting him down, he was hiding out in caves.
In that moment, I would have probably wanted God to do something for me! ‘God, help me run
faster than Saul.’ ‘God, help me hide well.’ ‘God, send an army for me.’ ‘God, just knock off
Saul!’ Those are some of the things I think I might have prayed. I think I would have asked God
to do something for me. But David asked for something much different. He doesn’t ask God for
something that comes from his hand, he asks for coming that comes in his face and in his heart.
He says I want to gaze on the Lord’s beauty. What is the value of that?
Another observation is that we’ve been talking, in this ‘God Anthology’ series, the quote from
A.W. Tozer, what comes to mind first when you think about God is the most important thing
about you. What comes to mind first when I think about God, faithfulness, sovereignty, love,
mercy, wrath, jealousy, all those things spring to my mind, but I don’t know that beauty would
ever come to my mind first. But how might our lives be different if beauty was the first thing that
came to our minds? How might we view the circumstances and situations in our lives differently
if beauty was the first thing we thought about when we thought about God? How would our
communities of faith live differently if beauty was one of the first things that came to our minds
when we thought about God?
Now, if we are going to focus on the beauty of God, then I think we have to wrestle with some of
the difficult things that come with it, because like wrath or jealousy, beauty kind of has a dark
side to it too. For instance, beauty can often be deceptive. Even Scripture tells us this, the idea
that beauty is often skin deep is true. If we go all the way back to the beginning, it was beauty
that triggered the fall. Eve saw something that looked desirable, she reached for it, and it was
because of beauty that creation spiraled downward into chaos and disorder. So beauty can be
deceptive. Beauty can also be subjective. It is often subject to our cultural and personal
preferences and filters, the idea that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So one of the questions I
often wrestle with, because I believe in absolute truth, is there also such a thing as absolute
beauty. To test this, I thought I’d bring in some things that I personally find beautiful. We’ll put
these on the screen. This is Urquhart Castle in Scotland. Who would not want to live there? This
next one is actually an audio clip, we’ll a couple seconds of it {music playing}. This is one of my
favorite parts of one of my favorite pieces of music, Handel’s Messiah. Most people would
probably identify that as beauty over, say, a Weird Al Yankovich thing. Here’s another thing I
find beautiful. This is my grandmother, who just turned 94, my mom and my little three-and-ahalf year old niece. Look at that little smirk on her face! Let’s go to the next one. This one you
might not find beautiful but this happens to be the last page of my Master’s thesis. I don’t really
remember what is going on here but it has something to do with phosphorous losses on sugar
cane fields and statistical analysis of that, so what’s beautiful about this is that there is beauty in
science and mathematics. The elegance of an equation that can reduce a very complex problem
to a simple solution. And it’s the last page of my thesis! Let’s go on, this is another one that I
find incredibly beautiful. That is an image of beauty! We’ve got one more, Corky’s bar-b-que! If
God is beauty, this will be in heaven! I don’t care what Leviticus tells us!
I may have unintentionally segued into the next point that not only might beauty be deceptive, it
might be subjective, it could also be perceived perhaps as meaningless. What’s the point? What
does it matter? There is no functionality to it. Author John Ruskin said that the most beautiful
things in the world are the most useless. Peacocks and lilies, for instance.
If beauty can be deceptive and beauty can be subjective and it can be meaningless, then how do
we understand if we are told in Scripture that it is an attribute of God’s character? I think in
response to ‘beauty can be deceptive’ God’s beauty leads us to truth because it draws us and
attracts us to Him. In terms of it being subjective, I would say that God’s beauty is absolute
because it is rooted in his character; it is rooted in the essence of who He is and it is unchanging
and it transcends our cultural and our personal preferences. And to the idea that it is meaningless,
I think there is a difference between functionality and meaning, that perhaps God’s beauty is
meant to bring us meaning beyond functionality, that it is meant to be desired and enjoyed and
delighted in.
G.K. Chesterton argued this:
The truth is that God is innately generous. Creation shows an extravagance of
color, complexity and design that goes far beyond simple functional value. At this
moment, high in the Italian Alps, a tiny white flower glistens in the sunlight. It
has never been seen by the human eye in all of its seasons of bloom. It is not in
the central part of the food chain. It was created by God in the hope that one day a
son of Adam or a daughter of Eve might glance at it and be blessed by its beauty.
I think we have to recognize that God’s beauty is not subject to our filters. Like his wrath, like
his jealousy, we can’t hold God in judgment. We can’t put them on trial and decide whether or
not it is beautiful. He is beauty because He is. It is part of his essence and character. His beauty
stands on its own regardless of our own perceptions of it.
Let’s just look through Scripture at some places. God is very, very concerned about aesthetics.
We see this throughout Scripture. If you go all the way back to the beginning, God, with one
word, spoke galaxies and planets into existence and cared about even the most minute orbit of an
electron. When we get to the second book of Scripture, in the book of Exodus, after God spent
two chapters describing the creation, in Exodus He spends 15 chapters describing the
construction, design and decoration of the tabernacle. And it gets a little bit cumbersome to read
because you read God telling Moses how to build. Then you read Moses telling the people of
Israel what God told him about how they should build it. Then you read about how they built it.
But for some reason, God saw fit to include all three of these conversations and activities in the
book. And what we read in Exodus 35, it says:
Then Moses said to the Israelites, “See, the LORD has chosen Bezalel son of Uri, the son of
Hur, of the tribe of Judah, 31 and he has filled him with the Spirit of God, with wisdom, with
understanding, with knowledge and with all kinds of skills— 32 to make artistic designs for work
in gold, silver and bronze, 33 to cut and set stones, to work in wood and to engage in all kinds of
artistic crafts. 34 And he has given both him and Oholiab son of Ahisamak, of the tribe of Dan,
the ability to teach others. 35 He has filled them with skill to do all kinds of work as engravers,
designers, embroiderers in blue, purple and scarlet yarn and fine linen, and weavers—all of
them skilled workers and designers.
30
The first person ever in Scripture to be described as being filled with the Holy Spirit was an artist
working on the tabernacle. God is concerned with the construction right down to the color of the
yarn.
An orthodox theologian by the name of Anthony Coniaris said:
From Exodus to Revelation, worship in the Bible is clothed in gold, silver, precious stone,
embroidery, robes of gorgeous fabric, bells and candles. God ordered beauty, even extravagant
beauty in worship. Even while his people were still wandering in the desert and living in tents, in
the scarcity of the wasteland, as the people of God were daily resting on God’s provision, on
God’s faithfulness to reign down food from heavenly, they worshiped like they were royalty.
I think we can fast forward all the way to the end of Scripture and see in the book of Revelation
where the New Jerusalem, the new city, is described in stunning detail, as we see that there are
foundations of the city made of gold and that the walls are adorned with all kinds of jewels, or
topaz and amethyst and emeralds, that there are 12 gates with 12 pearls. God makes beautiful
things.
But it is more than just the aesthetics. I think there is a place where God’s beauty goes beyond
the physical and into something much deeper, that it is rooted in his character and how his
character is displayed in so many different facets and different ways. I think one of the reasons
I’m a personal fan of contemporary and modern art is because it invites the viewer in to complete
the sentences. It is just as much about the process as it is the finished product. When you
understand something about the artist and their process, then what you see is more than just what
you see. It goes deeper than that. I’ve got a piece of art to demonstrate this. This is called
Synecdoche and it is on display in the East Wing in the National Gallery of Art right now. When
you look at this, it doesn’t look like anything that exciting. Technically, any of us could do this
piece. It is 422 tiles of varying shades of beiges and tans and neutral colors. It just doesn’t seem
like that interesting of a piece of art. But when you find out that each one of those tiles represent
the skin tone of one of the artist’s friends, family members, neighbors or fellow artists, it takes
on a whole new meaning. This is one of my favorite pieces of art because it says something so
powerful and so profound about community and unity and diversity and the beauty that we find
when we all come together. Really, what this is is 422 portraits of people. But because it is just
communicating one thing about the person, it says something far more profound than it would if
there was an actual physical representation of each person.
I think that in order to see the beauty of God, we have to go beyond just what’s on the surface.
When you look at a piece of art like this, you have to go beyond what you see on the surface to
get at the truth and the power behind what it is. See, God’s character and his beauty is found in
the harmony and tension of all these attributes that we’ve been talking about. There are
numerous words in the Old Testament and the New Testament that have to do with God’s
beauty. Some of them are equated almost synonymously with the word goodness. There are other
places in Scripture where God’s beauty can also be translated as his holiness or his majesty or his
honor. There is one word that shows up about 78 times that we understand as beauty that can
also be translated into the word strength. It is all these characteristics coming together in which
we see God’s beauty. His beauty is found in the harmony and the balance of all of these
characteristics working in operation with one another.
I think we get into trouble when we zoom in to closely on one of his traits. When we zoom in too
closely on wrath, we are going to get a distorted view of who God is. If we zoom in too much on
love, we get a distorted view of who He is.
I’ve got another piece of art that I want to use to illustrate this. One of my favorite painters is a
guy by the name of Georges Seurat. As technology began to develop, as the Industrial
Revolution took off, technology developed to a place where there were new ways of making very
accurate physical representations of things. So you had things like x-ray and photography that
emerged that were forcing painters to move to a different mode and method of how they did their
art. That’s when we saw Monet and the Impressionists spring forward. So instead of creating
things that were very accurate visual representations of physical beings, they used broad brush
strokes and invited the viewer in to complete the sentences. Seurat took this even a step further
and instead of using brush strokes, he just used dots, meticulously, over and over, just painted
dots on a canvas. This is a close up of one of his most famous paintings. It is called Sunday
Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. It is hanging in the Chicago Art Institute. So when
you look at it up close, there is not much beauty in this. It is just dots. It’s just a random
collection of dots with no uniformity, no images springing from it. But with a different
perspective, you see a different picture. If you take a few steps back, you see the painting it is
total form.
I think this is what God’s character is like. When we zoom in too closely, all we see is a mess of
dots. But when we get the right perspective and we step far enough back and see the beauty that
explodes on the canvas, there are colors that you see when you look at this painting that aren’t
actually on the canvas itself because you eye optically mixes them. And there are forms and
there are shapes that spring off of the canvas. If you get too close, all you see are dots. That’s
how God’s character is. We have to understand his wrath and his love and his jealousy and his
mercy in harmony in intention in balance in order and design with each other. When we see all
those things together in their proper perspective, we see the beauty of God. God is beauty. We
see his love for aesthetics and where He goes even deeper with beauty throughout Scripture.
What are some things that God finds beautiful? We read in Isaiah 52 that God finds feet
beautiful. It says: Beautiful are the feet that take the gospel. That verse is so important that it is
reiterated in the book of Romans: How beautiful are the feet of those who bring the good news.
We are also told in Scripture that when the woman came and anointed Christ, the woman with
the alabaster jar, it says: She has done a beautiful thing for me. In Acts 3 when the leper is
healed, he is at the beautiful gate. Josephus, the Jewish historian, said that it was called the
beautiful gate because it was made of bronze which made it more valuable than those made of
silver and gold. I find it fascinating that God would meet the least valued member of society at
the most valuable place in the city. In Ecclesiastes 3:11, we read: He makes all things beautiful
in its time. It is interesting that the verses that precede that have to do with there is a time for
love, there is a time for hate, there is time for war, there is a time for peace, there is a time for
laughing, there is a time for weeping, then it culminates with this idea that He makes it all
beautiful in its time. God will take the mess and work it into something beautiful. This story, if
anything, is a story of messy stuff. This is a story of mess. If we go all the way back to the
beginning, God created everything good, but it only took us three chapters to wreck it all. Adam
and Eve fall, fingers get pointed, there is relational mess. Then we move to the next generation
with Cain and Abel, I would say that jealousy and murder amounts to mess. Fast forward to
Noah and Noah comes into a boat with a bunch of animals in order to save humanity and that’s a
mess. Then this noble, heroic character of our faith gets drunk and disappoints his family. It’s a
mess. We fast forward to Moses. I like to think of Moses as the first small group leader. He was
leading people that were the biggest bunch of grumblers and complainers even after seeing God
do miracles in their midst, they complained. Fast forward to David. David is running for his life
and we read in I Samuel 22 that he is hanging out in a cave and as he is hiding there, first of all,
his family comes to visit him, then it says he was joined by some other company. Scripture says
that all of those who were in trouble and in debt and in discontentment met him there. Now, if
I’m running for my life, those are not the people I want hanging out with me. It was a mess. We
fast forward to the New Testament, Jesus comes, the Son of God, leaves his throne in heaven and
He comes clothed in the skin of his own creation subjected to the care of his own creation, born
in a feeding trough for animals. It is a mess. Then He gathers 12 guys around him, political
revolutionaries, tax collectors, fishermen, really, really messy people and these are the guys that
who are going to change the world. Then the church begins, and we like to think ‘O, if we could
just get back to the point of the early church,’ but the early church was a wreck. Acts 15, we
can’t even get 15 chapters into it and there is a mess and everybody has to converge in Jerusalem
for the Council of Jerusalem to figure out how we’re going to navigate the mess. And then we
see that most of the books in the New Testament are written to messes. Paul didn’t just have
things he wanted to say and write people. He was usually addressing problems that were in the
church. Let’s take Corinth, for example. In Corinth, they were dealing with incestuous affairs,
sexual promiscuity, doctrinal in-fighting, big egos, idol worship, and people getting drunk off
communion. Now, you know you have a mess in your church if people are getting drunk off
communion!
This is a story of messy, messy stuff. Yet, what we find in the midst of it is God’s fingerprint
emerging, writing a story of hope and redemption and beauty in the midst of it.
I wrestled with this a little bit. A few months ago, Ryan and I were in Rome and we were on a
little bit of a study tour of the church history and I was standing in St. Peter’s Basilica in the
Vatican and was just completely overwhelmed by the awe and the wonder of the art and the
architecture and everything pointed me to God. Everything moved my heart to worship. And the
more I studied church history, the more I thought maybe I need to be Catholic. I loved being in
that place and my heart swelled within me and I felt like my heart was in my throat because I
wanted to worship God because something about this place pointed me to the beauty of God.
Then I remembered, because of my church history, that the construction of this place was
facilitated in large part by the sale of indulgences. Then my stomach turned a little bit and then I
didn’t know what to do! On one hand, I wanted to worship God and there is certainly nothing
wrong with that; but the other side of me thought I needed to be discussed at the perversion of
the gospel at that point in our history in the people of God. I didn’t know what to do. So as I
stand in cathedral in conflict, all I know to do is to realize that it doesn’t have anything to do
with us, this is all about God and his sovereignty and his faithfulness and his redemptive heart
that is able to bring beauty out of mess; that even in our stupidity and inconsistencies and
heresies and hypocrisies and inquisitions and crusades and all the stupid things we do today that
we are not even aware of, that God is faithful to his story and God is faithful to his people and
the beauty of our faith is that God is writing the story and redemption and hope and love emerge
from the mess. God is beauty. He makes things beautiful.
How do we respond to this? I think there are a couple of things. I think we were created to reflect
beauty and I think we were created to enjoy beauty. Let me talk about reflecting beauty first. I
think that it is important for us to recognize that we do not own God’s beauty. I think sometimes
those of us who claim the name of Christ believe that we can define and characterize and draw
the boundaries around what is beautiful for everybody else. I think sometimes we think that just
because we claim the name of Christ that everything we create is beautiful and just because
someone else does not claim the name of Christ that anything they create cannot be beautiful.
We’ve got to recognize that we don’t own God’s beauty, we don’t control it, we don’t
manipulate it, we don’t define it, we simple reflect it. In this, I want to talk to our artists. I love
NCC because I believe this is a place where our artists can find their prophetic voice and their
platform. I love what Diana is doing in gathering artists together and giving them a place to
connect and giving them an opportunity to engage. If you got this when you came in and you are
an artist or you think you are an artist or you were an artist at one point in your life, go! You
need to be creating because it is a way that you reflect God’s beauty. And just because you are a
follower of Christ, you do not have permission to be lazy in your art. If anything, you should
pour more and more and more of yourself into it because it is an expression of worship and it is a
reflection of divine beauty and there is a great weight of responsibility that goes along with that.
To those of you who would not consider yourselves to be artists, you are not off the hook,
because we were created in God’s image and part of that means that we were created with the
capacity, the need, the drive, the ability to create. That doesn’t just show up on canvases or on
sheets of music, it shows up in the way that we address situations and circumstances we find
ourselves in. We are all called to be creative whether we are academics or entrepreneurs or
athletes or students or parents, we are called to be innovative. It’s a way we reflect God’s beauty
when we bring harmony and order and design to the world around us. Usually we find the
opportunities to do that in the places where we face what appear to be unsolvable problems.
That’s where God’s creativity springs up inside of us.
What’s an area right now where you can reflect God’s creativity in a situation you face?
Another way we reflect God’s beauty and cultivate it in our lives is by doing what Paul told Titus
to do when he wrote to the young pastor. He said: Adorn the doctrine of God, our Savior in every
respect. We reflect the beauty of God when we allow the deep things of God’s character to take
root and grow in us, things like the fruit of the Spirit that we see in Galatians. Things like
humility when Paul told the church in Philippi to have the same attitude that Christ had and to
walk in humility with one another. It’s the kind of thing that we read in Colossians when we are
told to clothe ourselves with compassion and kindness and humility and gentleness and patience.
It’s the thing Peter writes about when he says that we must have the beautiful quality of a gentle
and quiet spirit.
We reflect God’s beauty when we allow the character of Christ to be formed in us.
I think it is fascinating to compare Western theology with Eastern theology. In the church in the
West, we have understood the fall and redemption to be primarily about us incurring a debt that
we couldn’t pay and Jesus restoring us to proper legal position before God. In Eastern orthodox,
the understanding of fall and redemption is slightly different. The fall is understood to be a
distortion and a perversion of God’s perfection and his perfect image and Jesus’ work on the
cross is about restoring the divine image. So, in Western thought, it is about restoring a
relationship and in Eastern thought, it is about restoring beauty and value in the divine image. I
think they are both correct. That’s why, in Eastern orthodoxy, iconography is so important. To
our Western minds, that may seem a little bit weird, especially to our Protestant minds, that
seems real weird. But painters who would paint icons would spend weeks in spiritual
preparation. They would pray. They would fast. They would study and meditate on the
Scriptures because they believed that whatever they painted had to spring out of their personal
spiritual discipline. And they believed that whatever they painted was the result of their
relationship with Christ and they believed that the more beautiful they could paint it, the more
we would be able to see and understand and appreciate the beauty of God. So icons weren’t
primarily just about being used to help people grow closer to Christ, they were the result, the
expression of someone who was desiring to grow closer to Christ and in that, restore beauty in a
fallen world.
We need to reflect the beauty of God.
Secondly, we just need to enjoy the beauty of God. I think sometimes the things that we find to
be more purposeless and meaningless may be the very thing that give the meaning and
motivation to the things we do in our lives that we think are most meaningful. Maybe beauty is
just meant to be enjoyed and delighted in. Maybe this week, we need to find some opportunities
to just enjoy and delight in beauty. We need to get outside. We need to slow down and actually
taste our food. Maybe we need to walk through an art gallery. Maybe we need to go to a baseball
game. Maybe we need to enjoy the community of good friendship. Maybe we need to offer
forgiveness. These are all expressions of beauty. They are ways we engage in it, ways we delight
in it. It could mean slowing down long enough to enjoy God’s presence. Maybe prayer isn’t so
much about asking God for stuff as it is just enjoying his presence. Maybe prayer is more about
enjoying God than petitioning God. Maybe prayer is more about delighting in who He is as
opposed to looking for handouts. Maybe spend some moments in prayer this week that are solely
focused on enjoying God and who He is.
I think part of enjoying beauty means that we enjoy the process and we enjoy the journey. I think
for God, the process that we go through is just as important, if not more so, than the end result of
who we become in our lives or where we end up. It is about the process. We may be in the
middle of a mess in our lives right now. How are we engaging that process? Are we praying
prayers that are asking God to deliver us from the mess or are we content to just see God’s
beauty in the midst of it and trust that He can make beautiful things out of the messes of our
lives?
It is about enjoying the process. We were created to reflect God’s beauty and we were created to
enjoy God’s beauty.
Going all the way back to David, Psalm 27, he was in a mess, but he said the one thing he
wanted, if he could pray one prayer that God would answer, it was that he could be in God’s
presence all the days of his life and gaze upon his beauty. As we read further down in the
passage, he says not only that, he says, ‘I will seek your face.’ He sought not his hand but his
face. As we keep reading further down, in verse 13, he says, ‘I believe I will look upon the
goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.’ God is beauty. His beauty is rooted in the
harmony and the design and the order or all of his attributes in harmony with one another.
We were created to reflect his beauty and to enjoy his beauty. When we pursue his face, we get
that. And when we do that, we have the opportunity to see God in the land of the living, to see
beauty in the land of chaos and mess. How unbelievably incredibly is it that God took a thing of
horror and pain and agony, God took the cross and turned it into the most beautiful thing for us?
The biggest mess of all, a Savior bloodied and broken hanging on a cross and God turned that
into a beautiful moment where we are restored to relationship with Him, where we see the beauty
of the divine image restored in a fallen world.
If you’ve got mess in your life and you need to see the beauty of God, the first place you need to
come to is the cross. That’s where the beauty of God is most powerfully, potently rooted. And as
we navigate the mess that we find in our lives and the chaos of our lives, let our prayer be that
we can gaze upon the beauty of God. When we do that, maybe we will get a glimpse of Him in
the land of the living.
God, we thank You that You are beauty, even though this might be one of those things that some
of us would have never thought about in terms of it being an attribute of your character that we
need to honor and we need to embrace. God, I pray that we would see You, not just what You
do, but who You are and we would worship You for that, that we would seek your face and not
just your hand. God, I pray that we would reflect your beauty in the way that we reflect your
creativity and the way that we adorn the doctrine of God and the way we allow the fruit of the
Spirit to be abundant in our lives; the way we will clothe ourselves in humility and kindness and
peace and gentleness. God, I pray this week that we would find opportunities to just enjoy your
beauty, to enjoy You for who You are. God for those that need to come to the cross today, I pray
that your beauty would draw them and attract them and woo them to You, God, that You would
begin to do a beautiful thing in their lives, that You would create goodness and beauty out of
chaos and mess. In Jesus’ name, Amen.